Tuesday night the map went blue. Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress, and NBC News’ Decision Desk estimated they would hold at least 258 House seats, the widest House margin in 33 years. Two years ago the map went red, and Republicans took the White House, the Senate and the House in one night. If you have been alive and voting for any stretch of time, you have watched this movie before. One election it slides hard right. The next one it slides hard left. Each side calls it a mandate. Neither side calls it what it actually is: a country that cannot hold a direction long enough to finish anything. Which means…we are a fractured, regressing people and nation, not a united, advancing one.
To have this discussion, we have to reject picking a jersey unless we’re going to pick one that’s a T-shirt with two people trapped in it with opposing views. Stuck until they work it out. I have voted, worked and argued with people on both sides my entire life. What I keep coming back to is not a left problem or a right problem. It is a leadership problem and I think leadership and unity are the same word spelled two different ways.
Start with how a business works, because most of us understand that better than we understand Washington. A truly united company doesn’t need everyone to like each other. It needs everyone to agree on two things: the business has to stay in business, and the people in it want to stay employed. Some shops get a step further. They realize what they do matters beyond the paycheck. A trucking company that moves medicine. A nonprofit where nobody is there for the check; they are there for the mission. That shared purpose is what lets a dispatcher, a mechanic and a CFO who would never eat lunch together pull in the same direction on a bad Tuesday. The leader’s job is to name that purpose and keep it in front of everyone. When a leader instead splits the floor into camps, the work stops, the good people leave and the business dies slowly.
Clique-based, fractured business teams and governments are the fastest route to mission destruction.
Picture that business changing owners every four years, and every new owner walking in on day one, firing the last crew, tearing out the last crew’s processes and starting over without ever asking which of those processes actually worked. That is the federal government. That’s why trucking is jacked. We’ve had a dozen or so FMCSA Administrators in 7 years or so. Some had amazing ideas and solid lists of what they wanted to accomplish; often, they lacked support, but more than that, they lacked the time to fight the constant divide.
On Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump’s first executive action, Executive Order 14148, rescinded 78 Biden-era executive orders and actions in one signature. In March 2025, he rescinded 19 more. Four years earlier, President Biden signed 15 executive orders on his first day, many aimed at erasing Trump’s first-term imprint. The Paris climate agreement is the cleanest illustration of the loop: a Trump order in 2025 revoked a Biden order that had revoked a Trump order that had pulled the country out of the agreement. I am not here to tell you which of those orders were right. That is the point. Nobody on either side was asked to prove which ones were right. They were thrown out because of whose name was on them.
That loop is not free. Economists Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis built the Economic Policy Uncertainty index, now used by central banks and the European Commission, by tracking how often newspapers report uncertainty about taxes, spending and regulation.
Their 2016 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that a rise in policy uncertainty, like the one the U.S. saw between 2005 and 2012, foreshadowed a roughly 6% drop in gross investment, a 1.1% drop in industrial production, and a 0.35% drop in employment. A separate study in the Journal of Finance found that firms cut investment by an average of 4.8% in election years versus non-election years. In plain words: when a company cannot tell what the rules will be after the next election, it sits on its money. It does not build the terminal. It does not buy the trucks. It does not hire. Every one of us who has run a P&L knows that feeling. We’ve built a political system that manufactures it on a four-year timer.
So why do we keep doing this? Why do we choose to stay divided and to regress as a people and a nation?
Pew Research Center has tracked how Republicans and Democrats see each other for decades. In its 2019 study, 55% of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral than other Americans, and 47% of Democrats said the same about Republicans. Seventy-three percent of Americans said the two sides could not even agree on basic facts. Only 45% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans said people in the other party share many of their other values and goals.
We no longer just disagree on policy. We have decided the other guy is a bad person.
A nonpartisan group called More in Common has spent years studying this, and its findings run counter to the story we get on TV. Its Hidden Tribes research found that about two-thirds of Americans, what it calls the Exhausted Majority, are worn out by polarization and want something different. Its Perception Gap study found that Americans badly overestimate how extreme the other side is, and that the gap is widest among the most politically engaged people: the activists, the donors, the heaviest news consumers. The loudest voices have the least accurate picture of the people they are shouting at. Seventy-two percent of Americans told More in Common they believe we have more in common than what divides us.
So who is feeding the shouting? Partly the machine we all carry in our pocket. A team led by psychologist William Brady at New York University studied more than 560,000 tweets on gun control, climate change, and same-sex marriage. Every moral-emotional word in a post, words like hate, evil, destroy, greed, raised retweets by about 20%. The catch is that the boost happened almost entirely inside the sender’s own tribe. Outrage spreads like a grass fire among people who already agree with you and almost never crosses the line to people who do not. The NPR series on that work put it bluntly: anger draws clicks, which means a lot of people now have a business model for getting you mad.
Our elected officials figured that out. Too many of them now govern for the feed. A post that calls the other side evil does numbers. A post that says “I read the other party’s bill and three parts of it are good” gets ratioed by its own base. So the incentive points one way, and leaders who should be steering us toward the center line stomp the gas toward the ditch because that’s where the engagement is.
A 70-year-old experiment shows you exactly how to get out of this, and it was run on 11-year-old boys. In the summer of 1954, psychologist Muzafer Sherif took 22 boys to a Boy Scout camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma and split them into two groups. Once the groups started competing, they quickly turned on each other: raids, name-calling, flag burning. Sherif then tried the obvious fix. He just put the two groups together for meals and movies. It made things worse. What worked was what he called superordinate goals, problems so big neither group could solve them alone. The camp’s water supply suddenly stopped. A truck carrying food for both camps got stuck. The boys who had been fighting all week grabbed the same rope and pulled the truck out together. By the end of camp, they were sitting together at breakfast.
Contact alone did not heal anything. A shared problem with real stakes did. That is leadership in one sentence, and it’s what we are missing.
Which brings me to the two buckets.
Bucket one is everything we already agree on. It is longer than you think. Bridges should not fall down. Fraud against taxpayers is bad, full stop. Truck parking is a safety problem. Kids should be able to read. Veterans should get the care they were promised. Groceries should not cost a day’s pay. A real leader walks into office, puts that list on the wall and says: this is where we all agree, and this is where we are going to move first, together, with your name and my name on it. Advance the country where there is no argument, and bank the wins.
Bucket two is everything we are genuinely divided on. That bucket doesn’t get thrown out, and whoever won the last landslide doesn’t settle it. It gets worked. It takes crossing party lines, ideology lines, faith lines, regional lines. It takes sitting across from someone you think is wrong and finding out what they actually believe, not what your feed told you they believe. Some of it will take years. Some of it will never fully close. But bucket two should be a conversation, not a war, and nothing in bucket two should stop the work in bucket one.
I will give you a bucket-one item that somehow ended up in bucket two: fraud. In my day job, I chase carrier fraud, chameleon companies, and insurance schemes that put unsafe trucks next to your family on the interstate. You would think nobody would argue that fraud is bad. Yet I watch enforcement priorities flip with every administration, programs get stood up and torn down, and the people running the schemes simply wait out the turnover. Fraud should be the easiest agreement in America. The fact that it is not tells you how broken the process is. That one belongs at the executive level, with federal agencies working shoulder to shoulder with their state partners, no matter who holds the gavel.
The harder part, and the part I care about most. Who are we actually electing to lead?
Duke University political scientist Nicholas Carnes has spent his career on this question. Working-class jobs, the manual labor, service and trade jobs that keep the country running, make up roughly half the U.S. labor force. Yet the typical member of Congress spent less than 2% of their pre-congressional career in those jobs. Of the 783 people who served in Congress between 1999 and 2008, Carnes found only 13 had spent more than a quarter of their careers doing blue-collar work. His research also found that lawmakers who actually worked those jobs vote differently on economic issues than lawmakers who did not. The kicker? Voters are not the problem. Carnes found voters are perfectly willing to back blue-collar candidates. The working class just almost never makes it onto the ballot.
There is a difference between being a productive American and being a productive American who built this country from the blue-collar side. Both matter. But only one of them knows in their bones what it costs to keep the lights on.
I know because I grew up on a farm. I was made to work so much that I was the only 15-year-old legally emancipated minor in VA. I was raised to know nothing but work. I grew up on a farm that raised cattle and hogs and grew crops. Nobody handed me a network or a seat at a table. I worked concrete, salt water, trucks, grease and oil long enough that nurses tell me, every single time, that I have the toughest skin they have seen in 20 years of practice, and they are going to have to stab me to get an IV in. Those are not soft hands. My family has been in Virginia since Jamestown, and the people who built that colony and this country built it with hands like that.
That kind of frontline familiarity shows up in small places. I shop clearance at the grocery store every day I am home, no matter how much I make. I remember ground beef at $1.89 a pound, and that is not nostalgia. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the national average for uncooked ground beef at $1.89 in 1999. In July 2026, BLS reported the national average for 100% ground beef at about $6.89, the fifth-highest inflation-adjusted price since 1989, and this morning the 80/20 on my store’s shelf was $10. To be fair to the math, $1.89 in 1999 is about $6.43 in today’s dollars, so part of what we feel is ordinary inflation. But beef has outrun it, and wages for the people standing in that aisle haven’t kept pace with what they see in the meat case. I also remember filling up a car for $15 or $20 in 1998 and buying a new pickup for under $20,000. Today pickups roll off the lot with six-figure stickers. That is not distant history. That is one career ago.
A leader who has never stood in that aisle can read you the CPI report. A leader who has stood in it can feel what the CPI report means. That is not a credential you can fake with a camo jacket at a campaign stop or a slick video built to make you feel like they get it. People can tell.
When they can tell, they stop trusting anyone and swing the pendulum again.
The self-centeredness at the top runs all the way down. I see it on the highway every day. Somebody smokes a joint, gets on the interstate, runs 120 because it feels good and does not give a second thought to the family he might kill. That is not a separate problem from politics. It is the same disease: a culture that has decided the only thing that matters is me, my side, my feed, my win. Leaders set the temperature. When the people at the top model contempt, it rolls downhill.
Division is not new. The country has been through far worse, including a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans over the deepest bucket-two issue there ever was. Landslides are not new either. What is new is the speed of the reversal, the tools that reward contempt and the habit of treating the other side’s work as garbage by default. That last part is a choice, and choices can be unmade.
So here is what I want from whoever just won, and from whoever wins next time. Walk in and do an honest review of what the last crew did before you tear it out. Keep what worked. Put bucket one on the wall and move it. Take bucket two to the table, not to the timeline. And to the voters: start asking candidates where their hands have been. Not their degrees. Their hands.
Because right now we are not advancing as a country. Every two to four years, we revert to the starting line and call it victory. The Robbers Cave boys figured this out in three weeks with a stuck food truck and a length of rope.
We have a whole country stuck in the mud. Grab the rope.
You’re seeing a problem here when this is just the system working as designed.
The country moves plenty. Always in a leftward direction.
The Left is simply wrong about every area of policy, so the more it gets what it wants, the more unhappy it is.